Service design: visualizing employee experiences with Sheila Emmenegger
An office’s interior design can foster collaboration, create the mindset in which employees operate, optimize efficiency, and set the tone for the services the company will provide. But how can interior design plan out workplaces that function more as a symbiotic ecosystem that prioritizes processes, employees and in turn the customer?
We spoke with Swiss service and spatial designer Sheila Emmenegger, to gain a better perspective on how service design aims to improve workspaces, companies and employee interactions.
Sheila started her journey with service design by gaining a background in interior architecture. She soon realized that there were certain aspects missing in her studies that she wanted to incorporate in her profession, i.e. “human-centeredness” and “the strategic part of design.” She decided to study service design at the Politecnico di Milano and has since gone on to work at Dark Horse Workspaces, a Berlin-based design consultancy firm.
What are the principles of service design?
Imagine a workplace that is optimized toward the experience of the employee in order to create a seamless flow of services and spaces that benefit the people using the spaces, all while cutting down on loss of resources for the company. Service design centers the internal operations of companies by focusing on three main components: the people, the technology, and the processes.
“People have certain types of needs, and there are certain types of technology that exist right now for workspaces, for instance, video conferencing tools, digitalization tools, or desk sharing apps. The design process now is to connect the goals of companies, users, processes and technology together and see how to create the best experience for all stakeholders involved,” Sheila explained.
Service design aims to create spaces that foster interaction and communication. The first step in achieving this is to establish the overarching needs and goals of a company. The next crucial step is to speak with the employees of the company through various forms of workshopping and dialogue, to find out what their wishes and needs for a space are. The needs of both the company and employees can then be addressed by a loop of dialogue, which with each iteration, further reveals key values of each party.
Feedback, collaboration and iteration: key factors in Sheila’s process.
Service design in the workplace
In practice, service design visualizes how everyday work processes look like and creates a workplace based on the shared experiences of employees.
“[Studying service design] gave me this perspective of the bigger picture — trends, social settings, and culture — which through a specific design process can be broken into components to then be improved upon. This can be an improvement for the individual, but it can also be for a company, or even for the planet in future.”
In the process of creating more human-centered workspaces, service design is able to design for the wellbeing of the people who use the space, by bringing them directly into the design process.
How employees use a space is part of service design’s human-centered focus.
Service design & the participatory approach
Dark Horse Workspace’s process in service and spatial design involves collaboration, workshops, and a lot of empathy. As it states on their website: “Almost more important than the functionality of an environment is its emotional acceptance by each individual employee. And acceptance comes from having a say and participating.”
Through a series of interviews, questionnaires, and open forum discussions, team members from across a company can communicate their wishes and needs and collaborate across departments. This process offers the opportunity for employees to take cards and arrange floor plans that imagine their everyday work cycle. Then designers like Sheila can gain a bigger picture that helps them see how all the components of an office can work best together.
Via this participatory approach to designing a space, Sheila and the team at Dark Horse Workspaces are able to explore personalization and address the greater topic of workplace wellness, which in turn can pose solutions to other functional goals:
“When [personalization] in these spaces increases, people definitely want more plants as well. That's a request that we get quite often, which ends up improving a space’s acoustics and divisions. The wellbeing in a workspace is of increasing importance. So the space’s purpose is not just about working and then going home, but about facilitating an interaction of people. Plants are a big component [of that].”
Thus through service design’s emphasis on participation and collaboration an initial need can be met, say that of improving employee wellness with plants, which in turn functions to address a company’s overarching needs: that of better sound absorption and creating physical divisions in a space.
Workshopping with teams involves mapping out spaces and systems.
Looking toward the future of service design and the workplace
Sheila believes that service design can be geared towards human needs, but also the needs of the planet. Her goal as a service designer is to realize a future that is planet-centered with a component of human-centeredness.
“[As a service designer] you try to understand where you're losing some resources — this can be human wise, [material] resource wise — and what benchmarks you want a company to reach in the future. A circular economy is definitely the future we should work toward, because I think right now if we map out our everyday systems, we would discover a lot of resources that we just lose, whereas we can loop them in again, into a way that is more sustainable.”
As hybrid work increases in popularity, service designers are finding more and more ways to combine the digital and physical parts of the workday. Sheila suggests that the future of workspaces may see more thought put into how a metaverse workspace will function.
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